Phila. Gets By Without Printed News

September 15, 1985|by WILLIAM K. STEVENS, The New York Times

Last Sunday morning, on the second day of a strike that has shut down Philadelphia's two major newspapers for nearly a week now, a crowd in search of out-of-town papers at the Bryn Mawr News Agency was so unruly that the doors had to be locked.

"Animals," Jim Abel, the owner of the newsstand in that normally sedate Main Line suburb, called them later.

Since that first, almost panicky response to the sudden interruption of an entrenched daily ritual, things have calmed down. "Certainly, life hasn't stopped" in greater Philadelphia, the Channel 10 anchor said at the start of Wednesday night's television news program. The program has been expanded from 30 to 60 minutes to helpmake up for the disappearance of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News as a result of the strike by nine unions that began Sept. 7 over contract issues involving wages and job security. Negotiations between the unions and the Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., which publishes the newspapers, broke off amicably Friday.

Federal mediator Robert Kyler, who has overseen almost continuous talks since Wednesday, said Friday negotiations between PNI and the Teamsters, one of the unions on strike, could resume as early as tomorrow morning.

If life has not stopped, as the anchor pointed out later in his broadcast, something is clearly missing.

Dick Burroughs, one of Abel's customers, misses it all: the sports, the business news, the comics, "and of course the general news."

Bill Bremer, manager of an auto repair shop in the suburb of Paoli, feels deprived of the Sunday television schedules.

Thousands of sports fans are hungry for late information on baseball pennant races, and some also miss the detailed information that tells them how they did on the college football pools. "It's terrible," said one bettor, an administrator at a major university. "I had to watch cable TV for three hours on Sunday."

Moviegoers miss the movie advertisements; diners, the style pages. And people from many walks of life miss the self-help and entertainment features. Thousands of shoppers hunger for the Wednesday coupons, printed as newspaper advertisements, that bring supermarket discounts.

Job-seekers and apartment-hunters are without the classified advertisements, and merchants are deprived of the main conduit of information between them and consumers. This set of concerns has prompted Mayor W. Wilson Goode to declare, "We're not just talking about reading a newspaper, we're talking about real economic impact."

"There are a million and one small bits of information that people miss in their daily lives" said Dr. George Gerbner, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications. But what people miss most, he said, "can be summed up in the word 'ritual."' Aside from providing information about "locally accessible events," he said, reading the newspaper "serves as a ritual occurrence for most people, in which their sense of the world is constantly, periodically and regularly reinforced. It confirms people's view of how the world works."

Gerbner based his assessments largely on a handful of academic studies on the impact of newspapers on readers.

What people apparently do not miss in a strike, he said, is a newspaper's presentation of "the news" as news has traditionally been defined. When defined as happenings such as crimes, disasters, assassinations and diplomatic power plays, he said, "news is a very stable, highly predictable commodity - the times and the names and places change, but the events themselves never change."

Bremer agrees. Despite the newspaper strike, he said, "you can pick up most of the news by just listening around."

Sales of out-of-town papers have gone up sharply here since the strike began, and some news dealers say they could sell more copies if they could get them. Spokesmen for The New York Times and The Washington Post said those papers had declined to increase the number of copies shipped to the Philadelphia area. "It's our policy not to change our draw in a strike situation," said Leonard R. Harris, a Times company spokesman. "We feel we should not cash in on any other city's problems."

The void has been at least partly filled by the television news programs, at least one of which includes a reading of the comics.